Thursday, March 17, 2016

Open Sourcers Race to Build Better Versions of Slack | WIRED

"Slack’s growth has shown that even seemingly ancient technologies like chat can still be improved, particularly when it comes to using instant messaging for work. But Slack has the limitations that all proprietary cloud apps do. Your data lives on someone else’s servers. Customization is limited. You have to trust that Slack the company will make the changes you want to Slack the app and not make changes you don’t want.

That’s why the open source community has been racing to build better versions of Slack, even though countless open source chat apps exist already. In fact, Slack alternative Mattermost and Rocket.chat topped the Black Duck Rookies of the Year report, an annual list of new open source projects that attract the most developers and produce the most code. Along with other open source chat apps such as Friends and Let’s Chat, these projects are hoping to provide not just a more open alternative to Slack, but beat the company at its own game by providing features Slack doesn’t yet have."